Comparative Politics | Development & Migration | Technology & Media

After Paris, Now What?

Like many people I’ve been following the events in Paris with shock and sadness. I’ve watched the narratives evolve out of the tragedy, and a few resonate with me.

Western leaders have seemed incapable of any kind of creative response to ISIL and the wider risks they pose. I responded on Twitter to an article about the knee jerk reaction to declare war on ISIL and to ban Syrian immigrants from entering Western countries. There’s something almost quaint to this thinking; it’s like it’s the 1940s and we’re storming the beach head, fighting another nation state’s army. There’s a place for a significant military response against ISIL, but if there isn’t a correspondingly big diplomatic and civil society effort that pulls a lot of competing sides together, ISIL will continue dividing and surviving. To those who say we don’t/can’t negotiate with our enemies, I say learn your history. The U.S. routinely negotiated with the Soviet Union for 40 years, often with the risk of a nuclear exchange on the line. The current state of affairs in the Middle East is partially the outcome of a long decline in U.S. diplomatic capacity, and an over reliance on force and securitization. Unless we change that, ISIL will continue to survive as an organization.

It’s hard to make policy or design a complex response if people are fundamentally ignorant. This person thinks the problem is that terrorists leave their own country (read: Syria) and attack the West:

Based on the known attackers’ nationality/residences, his solution is to keep them in…Belgium and France? While he’s just some random guy on Twitter, it’s problematic that a majority of U.S. Governors as well as Republican presidential candidates have the same outlook. Will stopping refugees make a locality safer? Unlikely; as far as we can tell the attackers weren’t refugees. Indeed, trying to sneak a terrorist cell into Europe via the refugee routes would be the worst possible and least efficient way to get them to a target. They could drown, get stuck in Serbia/Hungary/Croatia/etc, get picked up at one of the myriad check points between Syria and Western Europe, or freeze to death sleeping rough in the woods. Objectively it would be stupid for ISIL get terror cells into the West this way; by extension would be stupid to assume that blocking refugees will keep terrorists out (especially if they’re already citizens of the country to be targeted, and living in that country). Stupid policy decisions will neither mitigate the threat, nor address the humanitarian crisis.

This brings us to the last point. Stupid policy decisions are usually the outcome not only of objective analytic failure, but also an abdication of one’s moral grounding. 30 U.S. Governors and however many candidates remain in the Republican primary have, in saying they won’t take refugees, allowed ISIL to set the terms of their moral obligation to their fellow humans. They’re the worst kind of cowards, the kind that use a humanitarian calamity to gain political points while living in a publicly provided security bubble. It’s a sad commentary on the moral fabric of the U.S. that people of so little integrity and humanity can make it as far as they have in politics.

The only way to defeat the ISIL’s of the world is through a smart, humane, morally grounded set of policies. Force will be necessary, but so too will smart diplomacy, and a recognition that we have a moral obligation to aid the victims of a brutal regional conflict.